The Biden administration's Middle East policy is an unmitigated disaster. Ever since taking power in 2021, President Joe Biden has been alienating America's allies, coddling America's enemies, and making US power in the region weaker.
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Let's begin with Biden's support for the Palestinians. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Biden restored aid to the Palestinians. To date, his administration has given the Palestinians more than one billion dollars in aid. Biden steadfastly believes that this support will bring the so-called two-state solution closer to fruition. He's dead wrong. His support for the Palestinians only encourages them to step up their campaign of terrorism in the hopes of destroying Israel.
In fact, a study by Palestinian Media Watch found that when aid to the Palestinians increases, as it did under the Obama administration and now under Biden, Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel increase. In contrast, under the previous Trump administration, which significantly cut aid to the Palestinians, attacks against Israelis decreased.
Meanwhile, as Biden supports the Palestinians, he derides Israel, America's greatest ally in the Middle East. The Biden administration relentlessly criticizes the Jewish state for building homes for Israelis in Judea and Samaria – because apparently, Jews living in their ancestral homeland reduces prospects for peace. It doesn't. You know what does reduce prospects for peace? Paying Palestinians generous monthly salaries for killing Jews – a policy known as pay-for-slay, which the Palestinian Authority refuses to end. But Biden doesn't seem to care about that, nor does he seem to care that the PA continues to indoctrinate Palestinian children to hate and murder innocent Jews.
Biden also doesn't seem to care that PA President Mahmoud Abbas is in the 19th year of his four-year term. Yet, he has nothing but disdain for Israel's democratically-elected government, because some of its members are supposedly guilty of racism. This is the attitude of a president who has no problem associating himself with antisemites like fellow Democratic Party members Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Biden won't even invite Israel's prime minister to the White House. But you know who did extend an invitation to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? None other than the People's Republic of China, the emerging superpower hoping to usurp US power in the Middle East and beyond. In fact, even though President Biden has moved heaven and earth to support the Palestinians, the Palestinians have responded by walking straight into China's open arms, signing a "strategic partnership" with the communist dictatorship last month.
China even managed to help negotiate the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. But the rapprochement between the two arch-rivals is not just a result of Chinese diplomacy. It is also the result of America's waning power in the Middle East under the Biden administration. Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Arab states in the region can clearly see that Biden is not committed to preventing Shiite Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Indeed, word now has it that Biden is negotiating a secret deal with Iran to contain its nuclear ambitions rather than prevent them. The Sunni Arabs undoubtedly feel abandoned by the US and have decided to try and mend fences with the Islamic Republic in the hopes of persuading the mullahs not to harm them. Good luck with that.
It's very tragic that Biden did not build on the success of the Trump administration in the Middle East – the success demonstrated by the Abraham Accords, by which Israel and four Arab states agreed to establish full diplomatic relations. I can't help but wonder if Saudi Arabia would already have joined the Accords if Trump was still in the White House.
Biden also missed a golden opportunity to weaken, and even depose, Iran's Islamist regime when mass protests erupted in the country last September. But alas, he left the Iranian people at the mercy of the mullahs.
And unfortunately, Biden still has another two years in which to make the US a second-rate power in the Middle East by pushing away America's allies and indulging America's enemies in the region.
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